In a variety of ways, the opinions in this volume show that despite the facial neutrality of contemporary tort law, gender, race, and the personal identity of plaintiffs still affect the availability of tort claims, the prospects for liability and the measure of damages. Although doctrines change, the updated versions often reproduce gender disadvantages and other inequalities, even if in softer, less explicit forms. Legal historian Reva Siegel has described this phenomenon as “preservation through transformation,” a process by which a basic hierarchy may remain intact even though the legal rules and legal rhetoric surrounding it undergo substantial change.29 In fact, the basic hierarchy is preserved precisely because it has been updated to fit the sensibilities of the time. In law, a regime can soften, admitting more exceptions or providing somewhat more protection to a vulnerable group, without dislodging the basic power structure.

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Fem K Organizing › 2NC › AT: Perm

IP cannot be reclaimed- rotten assumptions at its core guarantee inequality

Mathew, JD/MPA, 21

(Sasha, A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons, Critical African Studies, 13:1, 115-126, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1909881 )

Can IP be reformed? The steady march of IP regimes across the global South has not been without resistance. We see the use of countervailing strategies and the application of IP law as a legal vehicle for ‘facilitating (or thwarting) recognition of diverse contributors to social discourse’ (Sunder 2006). The linking of identity politics (issues of recognition) with intellectual property (issues of redistribution) highlight the efforts of individuals from marginalized communities to resist appropriation and benefit materially from their own cultural production. Intellectual property law thus becomes more than a tool for incentivizing creativity and emerges as a terrain of struggle for social relations. The language of this struggle is voiced in terms of human rights, as both the Universal Declaration for Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights affirm the right of all peoples to be recognized for and materially benefit from their cultural creations. However, the struggle of marginalized communities to benefit from their own production is not an even or fair one: the field is tilted. Their IP claims often do not succeed, not only because of the way the law is constructed, but equally because of their unequal bargaining capacities and resources (Sunder 2006). Consider how in India, Brahmin supremacy was sustained by their monopoly over education and the learning of English, and enforced by a violent system of intra– and inter-caste social restrictions and punishments (Chandra 2012). Even today, the upper-castes perceive themselves to be the natural inheritors of scientific research and practice in India; there is an appalling under-representation of Dalits, indigenous, and lower-caste groups in India’s leading scientific and technical institutions despite the fact they far outnumber the Brahmin minority. Access to knowledge production systems and to the markets that value this knowledge continue to be blocked by compounded access barriers. More pertinently, it is worthwhile to ask whether those long excluded from particular types of knowledge can truly be empowered upon the terrain of an alien epistemology built in tandem with social and political hierarchies whose very existence relied on scientific and moral justifications of inequality. Intellectual property regimes purport to be neutral, but at their core, they presume gendered, racialized, epistemological hierarchies. The philosophical underpinnings of the intellectual property rights regime exhibit the binaries that characterize male-oriented epistemologies: male/ female, public/private, scientific/primitive, rational/relational (Burk 2007). Feminist and decolonial ways of being and doing on the other hand, strive to transcend the binaries that naturalize domination and instead emphasize horizontality and mutuality. Feminist scholar Marion Crain (1857) advances an alternative vision of how women exercise power: ‘Power exercised in a community emanates horizontally, expanding outward in a web-like fashion, rather than vertically in a hierarchy (as quoted in Levy and Newman 2019, 119). In the current Information Age, as forces of capital chart out new public domains from which to generate monopoly rents, human experience and behaviour itself has become the raw material for finished ‘prediction products’ in advertising marketplaces, as Shoshana Zuboff has argued (Zuboff 2018). Private property is an unsuitable organizing principle for society in the Information Age. The opportunity to make meaning must be accessible to all on equal terms. In his Guerrilla OpenAccess Manifesto, Aaron Swartz declared that permitting those at elite universities, but not ‘children in the global South’ to access the world’s scientific and cultural heritage is ‘outrageous and unacceptable’ (Swartz 2008). And yet, as IP scholar James Boyle points out, much of 20th Century culture is ‘lost culture’. The inordinate tenure of copyright has ensured that copyrighted and commercially are unavailable because they have no identifiable copyright holder who could agree to ‘reprint the books, screen the films or play the songs’. Records are incomplete or absent (Boyle 2008, 9). As we become aware of the power relations at play in the construction and valuation of knowledge, we should endeavour to create alternative accounts of knowledge and value, rather than simply seek to extend existing protections to disempowered groups. We must attempt to imagine an orientation towards knowledge which values the abstract and relational, and locates value in non-market forms. In other words, we must, as Audre Lorde urges us, forge new tools to dismantle the master’s house.

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Fem K Organizing › 2NC › AT: IP Inevitable

Calvert, PhD, 13

I will start by examining the concept of competition. We typically understand competition as a sport or game with two or more opposing forces, ways of keeping score, and a clear endpoint that determines when the best rival has won. Competition is goal driven and rule-bound. Certain kinds of play are ruled in or out, and the criteria for winning or losing are explicit. This kind of competition tests the skill of players in relationship to one another. Sometimes competitions are between teams, and sometimes between individuals, and sometimes teams and individuals also compete against their own personal best. The kind of competitiveness that the 2011 ALISE conference theme invoked shares some things in common with games of sport. Two or more actors attempt to solve a problem of some kind, and there are objective measurements of some sort that serve to score the outcomes, which means there are also end points or measuring points. Unlike games, which have relatively few clear and agreed-on measures (primarily score) and agreed-on end points, market competitiveness has a plethora of measures. The idealized measurement for market success is when the consumer chooses one product or service over another. Profit is the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest. In this idealization, the consumer is the judge of the best product or outcome, at the best price: an indexical measure of competitiveness and innovation. Our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling. Hence, there is no guarantee that consumers choose the best products, or that the best products make it to market in the first place. And “best” is itself such a problematic measure: best for whom, in what ways? As these questions highlight, this kind of measurement can obscure unsavory elements of competition; for example, the extremely low cost of food in the US is underwritten by squalid labor conditions for migrant workers in agriculture. Scoring market success is not really about having the objectively best product. A given company might find ways to be profitable even when its product is not typically selected. Furthermore, the competition can be won not only by creating what others haven’t, but also by stopping them from creating. In other words, competition is no guarantor of creating new innovations or knowledge. Like a game, market competitions have winners and losers; this kind of competition is figured as a zero-sum game. In addition to the market rationale embedded in the concept of competition, there is another register of the term, which is an evolutionary one, with individualistic and social Darwinist overtones. The term evolution is often used in an unscientific, teleological way. We might describe an individual as highly evolved, when we mean more intelligent, ethical, spiritual, or rational. But evolution is value neutral and non-teleological; there is no guarantee that culturally important qualities will be the outcome of evolutionary processes. Evolution fits organisms to their environments: if competition for resources and reproductive competition pressures require more stupid and less attractive organisms, then more stupid and less attractive organisms will be the winners of the game.

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2024 Michigan Kritik

Fem K Organizing › 2NC › FW/K Prior

Ignorance of gender impoverishes policy analysis

Hawkesworth, PhD, 09

(Mary, Prof @ Rutgers, Policy discourse as sanctioned ignorance: theorizing the erasure of feminist knowledge Critical Policy Studies Vol. 3, Nos. 3–4, October–December 2009 )

What counts as policy-relevant knowledge in this era of globalization? How are the parameters of inquiry fixed for policy analysts and policy-makers by epistemic frameworks that are seldom subjected to scrutiny? How do the prevalence of certain policy frames and the erasure of others provide insights into the politics of knowledge that structure contemporary policy studies? To shed some light on these questions, I will explore the comparative openness of the field of policy studies to neoliberal and feminist discourses on globalization. When the emergence of neoliberalism as a transformative force in policy circles is traced to the ‘Washington Consensus’ developed in the early 1970s, there is a striking parallel between the decades of neoliberal and feminist ascendance. Neoliberalism was birthed as a top-down policy strategy, which relied upon the policy-making power of nation-states and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for its materializations. Feminisms1 erupted both within international organizations and institutions and as bottom-up mobilizations of women engaged in grass-root struggles in communities around the globe. Both neoliberalism and feminism envision a future, and combine activism, political interventions, and policy transformations to bring that future into being. Both neoliberalism and global feminism have sought profound changes in consciousness, attitudes, mentalities, expectations, not just of institutions and agencies of governance, but of individuals in their daily lives. Neoliberal globalism2 and global feminism have also devised similar multi-level formulae for success in achieving systemic changes, targeting transnational organizations, national governments, and individual consciousness as sites of transformation. At a rudimentary level, both transformative visions have required that activists who press for change ‘from the outside’ work with key government ‘insiders’ to secure changes in law and policy. Both also have involved the development of appropriate state and international policy machinery to achieve desired policy outcomes. Both have relied on transnational covenants and conventions to leverage change within particular nations. Over the past three decades, both have wrought profound changes in the world. Despite equally ambitious agendas, however, these two politically-inspired intellectual frameworks have experienced very different fates within the academy. While neoliberalism has become the hegemonic frame, feminism has been largely ignored. Neoliberal globalism has profoundly transformed the study of politics and policy over the past three decades. Whether one’s focus is domestic, transnational, or international policy, neoliberalism has changed the terms of debate, challenging the adequacy of long established policy frames and instruments. Shifting attention to global flows of capital, labor, finance and trade, economic restructuring, innovations in technology and communication, changing dynamics of national sovereignty, and ‘democratization’, neo-liberalism has disrupted established understandings of key policy actors and effects as notions of sovereignty, political determination, and national interest have been called into question. Discursive shifts introduced by neoliberalism are at once systemic and radically incomplete. They are systemic in that any ‘competent’ policy analyst (or social scientist for that matter) has to grapple with the complexities of global glows, transnational networks, fast-changing information technologies, marketization and the literatures that probe these dynamics if his/her work is to pass muster. They are radically incomplete, however, in that neoliberal discourses, like their predecessor paradigms in political science and policy studies, tend to omit gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as categories of analysis. Policy studies within neoliberal frames routinely neglect feminist scholarship and the critical insights that accrue from consideration of the majority of the world’s population (women) and the constitutive power relations among men and women of particular races, ethnicities and nationalities across the world.3 The neglect of feminist scholarship in mainstream policy discourses is all the more puzzling because feminist scholars working in fields of political economy, international relations, development studies, policy analysis, philosophy, history, and women’s studies have spent the past four decades investigating the dramatic economic, political, and technological transformations associated with neoliberal globalism.4 They have demonstrated that globalization is a thoroughly gendered and racialized phenomenon. And they have illuminated how race and gender operate as sites of power within processes of globalization, explicating the mechanisms within traditional scholarship that ‘naturalize’ and ‘normalize’ embodied hierarchies, rendering raced and gendered power relations invisible. My goal in this essay is to sketch some of the crucial feminist policy insights that are routinely erased from mainstream scholarship and to probe that continuing erasure. Toward that end, I will advance several hypotheses to account for persistent omissions that are too pervasive and too costly to be taken as simple oversights. (268-9)

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Fem K Organizing › 2NC › FW/K Prior

The ballot should privilege questions of epistemology and method- failure to do so allows bias to taint the policy making process

Hawkesworth, PhD, 09

(Mary, Prof @ Rutgers, Policy discourse as sanctioned ignorance: theorizing the erasure of feminist knowledge Critical Policy Studies Vol. 3, Nos. 3–4, October–December 2009 )

It is possible to generate many hypotheses to account for the exclusion of feminist knowledge from mainstream discourses. Perhaps the most blatant hypothesis might give explanatory weight to changing configurations of power over the past four decades as neoliberalism gained ascendancy in Western nations. On this view, policy studies simply mirror prevailing power relations. Rather than ‘speaking truth to power’, policy studies accredit views that are useful to those in power. If, however, as the prevailing norms in social science suggest, truth is independent of power, then other grounds for the neglect of feminist scholarship should be considered. At a slightly less cynical level, one might posit fundamental incompatibilities between mainstream scholars’ desire to work within the system and the incrementalism and commitment to stability that accompany that stance, and feminist scholars’ emphasis on social change. One might consider disciplinary definitions of what counts as policy issues worthy of investigation and probe the complex ways that the rational actor model, the organizational process model, and the bureaucratic politics model of policy-making (Allison 1971) render women in particular, and race and gender more generally, invisible or insignificant. One might examine the continuing effects of Western demarcations of public and private spheres, as well as formal versus informal sectors of the economy, on the definition of institutional practices warranting policy investigation. At a methodological level, one might look at the potent consequences of treating race and sex as control variables in a quest for universal explanation, which both naturalizes and renders invisible processes of racialization and gendering that reproduce and preserve hierarchies within the current world order. Much could be learned from sustained investigation of each of these hypotheses. In addition to presumptions concerning incrementalism, policy questions worthy of investigation, the fruitfulness of particular models of policy-making, and understandings of race and sex as demographic variables rather than socio-political processes, I would like to suggest that fundamental epistemological assumptions, which inform policy studies, contribute to the erasure of feminist knowledge. Fundamental disagreements about ‘the politics of knowledge’ give rise to sanctioned ignorance. Dominant approaches to policy studies remain committed to the principle that ‘scientific policy analysis is and ought to be value neutral, ethically detached, and confined to predicting the consequences of alternative policy actions’ (Dunn 1983, p. 1, see also Hawkesworth 1988). Value neutrality as a regulative ideal is intended to free policy research from bias, distortion, and willful manipulation, to enable policy scholars to capture ‘the world as it is’. Yet it is precisely this assumption about the possibility of valueneutral inquiry that feminist scholars have called into question. Feminist scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to the examination of methodological ‘neutrality’ in the natural and social sciences. Their investigations have revealed extensive androcentrism in diverse research methods manifested in the selection of problems deemed worthy of investigation, research design, definition of key terms and concepts, decisions concerning relevant evidence and counter-examples, data collection and analysis, interpretations of results, and assessments of practical falsifications (Bleier 1979, 1984, Fausto-Sterling 1986, Hubbard et al. 1982, Eichler 1980, Westkott 1979, Stanley and Wise 1983). Contrary to claims of neutrality, feminist research has demonstrated a pervasive level of sexism in scientific research that renders women invisible, ignores women’s concerns, precludes elicitation of certain kinds of information about women, reproduces gender stereotypes in the operationalization of terms, denies that gender might serve as an explanatory variable in any instance, and reverts to functionalist explanations that accredit the status quo (Kelly et al. 1987, Benston 1982, Vickers 1982, Farganis 1989). Sandra Harding has suggested that not only are the concepts, methods, and conclusions of inquiry permeated by androcentrism, but sexism also influences the recruitment of personnel in science and the evaluation of the significance of scientists’ research. ‘If women are systematically excluded from the design and management of science and their work devalued, then it appears that neither the assignment of status to persons within science nor the assessment of the value of the results of inquiry is, or is intended to be, valueneutral, objective, socially impartial’ (Harding 1986, p. 67). And Margaret Benston (1982, p. 59) has concluded that ‘present science practices a kind of “pseudo-objectivity” where because they are not taken explicitly into account, subjective factors are uncontrolled and unaccounted for.’ In contrast to methodologies developed in accordance with positivist assumptions about knowledge production, which explicitly deny any political dimension to ‘scientific’ inquiry, feminist research acknowledges that particular political convictions inspire its existence. Feminist convictions attune scholars to power dynamics that structure women’s and men’s lives. By making power dynamics visible, probing silences, absences, and distortions in dominant paradigms, feminist inquiry challenges established explanatory accounts and identifies new questions for research. ‘It is the political commitment that feminists bring to diverse fields that motivates them to focus attention on lines of evidence others have not sought out or thought important; to discern patterns others have ignored; to question androcentric or sexist framework assumptions that have gone unnoticed or unchallenged; and sometimes to significantly reframe the research agenda of their discipline in light of different questions or an expanded repertoire of explanatory hypotheses’ (Wylie 2000, p. 16). Noting that methodologies involve philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge, as well as practical questions concerning strategies of inquiry, feminist scholars have pointed out that methodologies are group-specific and as such political. The appropriate methodology for any particular inquiry is a matter of contestation as scholars often disagree about the ‘way to truth’. Strategies that are accredited as legitimate means to acquire truth gain their force from decisions of particular humans; thus there is a power element in the accreditation of knowledge. Power is never the only factor involved, but neither is it a negligible factor. Feminist scholarship suggests not only that politics is embedded in the research process, but that particular political commitments improve the quality of analysis, heighten objectivity, and enhance the sophistication of research findings. Far from being a source of bias and distortion, feminist convictions and principles are deemed an asset to research. In marked contrast to positivist conceptions of science, feminist scholarship suggests that a commitment to struggle against coercive hierarchies linked to gender, race, and sexuality, a commitment to promote women’s freedom and empowerment, and a commitment to revolt against institutions, practices, values, and knowledge systems that subordinate and denigrate women, enhance the truth content and deepen the insights of feminist accounts of the world. Thus feminist scholarship not only breaks with but denies the possibility of guiding precepts of positivism, such as value-neutrality, norms of distanced, dispassionate research, and the quest for universal explanations. (276-8)

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Fem K Organizing › 2NC › FW/K Prior

IP law is incoherent- our hegemonic understanding obscures the contradictions of capitalism and occlude alternative ways of relating to knowledge

Mathew, JD/MPA, 21

Intellectual property as a historically and politically contingent institution Patents, copyrights, and trademarks as the ‘deeds to the property of the informational age’ (Kapczynski 2017) form an important terrain in the struggle against inequality and subordination, because scientific and cultural knowledge is inextricably linked to social and political power. Property is an institution contrived to serve the interests of the dominant classes, but it has lacked historical or geographic consistency (Macpherson 1978). Property represents a political relationship among people; a set of rights and claims, foremost among which is ownershipcontrol of access, disposal and benefits. The extension of ownership to knowledge and products of the mind, has now come to occupy hegemonic status, taken as granted as the status quo, but was markedly absent in pre-modern civilizations (Hesse 2002). While copyrights, patents and trademarks all have existed as ‘historically distinct phenomena’ and intellectual property is not a single historical category, for our present purpose it suffices to note that the key elements of intellectual property arose within, and represent, the historical and political conditions of postEnlightenment Western European capitalism (Darch 2017). Ownership as exclusion and value assignment as market-mediated, are not representative of the wide variety of relationships between persons and ideas, which have characterized non-Western and pre-modern societies (Hesse 2002). For instance, ancient Chinese thought placed value on the preservation, interpretation and transmission of knowledge, rather than originality; and while there was commerce in the ‘vessels’ of ideas, the ideas themselves could not be owned (Hesse 2002, 27). Similarly, in the Islamic tradition, knowledge came from God; it had guardians, but not owners. The means of transmission was largely oral recitation, and while texts had authors, attribution of authorship was a matter of ‘textual integrity’ and authentication, rather than ownership (Hesse 2002, 28). Intellectual property also faltered when confronted with indigenous knowledge systems because the nature of the knowledge itself challenged the ways in which IP attempted to transform knowledge into commodity. For instance, indigenous cultural knowledge emphasizes generational continuity and oneness with natural ecosystems; attempts to separate or alienate this knowledge, damages it (Harding 2003). These alternative approaches are often grounded in a sense of responsibility, rather than claims and entitlements. Recent scholarship in human rights draws attention to the ways in which the global human rights regime deprioritizes responsibilities as essential correlates to rights (Sikkink 2020). Intellectual Property (IP) as a set of rights and claims is a politically contingent institution that arose out of Western political philosophies. IP scholars invoke Lockean labour theory of property as a foundational philosophy of IP: ‘every man has a property in his own person’, from which it follows that ‘the labour of his body, and the work of his hands…are properly his’ (Macpherson 1978). Hegel’s conception of one’s ideas as an expression of self-consciousness have also been used to justify an ownership relation to ideas (Callahan 2017b, 70). As Macpherson pointed out, the institution of property itself represents the two contradictory elements of market societies: self-sovereignty and citizenship– which is a ceding of sovereignty to the state. However, ‘possessive individualism’, which offers a foundational justification for ownership of private property, cannot sustain a robust conception of social or political obligation (Callahan 2017b, 70). In pre-modern, as well as Socialist and Marxist practice, a more collectivist social ethos has conditioned the development of IP differently than in the West. Russia, China and Cuba have all been criticized for not adopting and enforcing the IP regime instituted by the US and Western Europe (Chander and Sunder 2004). While they are considered natural elements of capitalist economic systems, IP regimes encode an embedded contradiction: they deter competition by conferring monopoly rights to intellectual products (Perelman 2017, 56). Monopolies on the production of knowledge offer rents vastly disproportionate to those set by competitive markets, since the marginal costs of knowledge production are trivial (Perelman 2017, 56). In a way, they expose the contradictions of capitalism, which do not rest upon markets that are truly free, but rather, represent the considerable efforts of capital to secure itself toward accumulation and advantage. In this instance, by lobbying for expanded and more stringent IP protection. Interrogating assumptions The systems of intellectual property law developed by industrialized Western countries and codif ied in international legal regimes, operate to transform ideas and knowledge into a form amenable to market valuation and exclusion of access. In doing so, it encodes several assumptions that when interrogated seriously, destabilize its own claims of neutrality. For the purpose of my present analysis I focus on copyrights and patents, and interrogate their key premises from an intersectional standpoint.

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2024 Michigan Kritik

Fem K Organizing › 2NC › 2NC Epistemology

We must evaluate economics from the outside in- dominant modes of thought and their androcentric assumptions don't just structure economics, they structure the political process we use to select policies and the moral attitudes we use to chose between them

Harding, PhD, 95

(Sandra, Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective, Feminist Economics 1:1)

How might we accomplish our tasks of systematically identifying values and interests that constitute scientific projects, and thus that tend not to vary between legitimated observers, and of specifying the difference between those that enlarge and those that limit our knowledge? First, we can reflect on the familiar observation that it will be easier to identify the contours of a given conceptual scheme or paradigm from "outside" than from within its categories, concepts, puzzles and other preoccupations that usually fill up the entire horizon of our thought. We want to start off our thought from "elsewhere." Of course, there is nowhere that is outside all culture; there are no vantage points anyone could find that are not themselves also discursively constructed within power relations: that was the delusion of weak objectivity and its neutrality ideal that must be abandoned. Nevertheless, we still have useful resources, for we can start thinking from within another, different framework that enables us to look more objectively at our usually favored one. Where might we find one? Here, we can reflect on a second familiar observation that ways of life or distinctive kinds of activities tend to give rise to distinctive ways of thinking and seeing the world. What we do both enables and limits what we can know. Of course the sciences incorporate this insight in their understanding of the importance of having diverse methods as resources: each enables the researcher to interact in different ways with the world, and so to have the chance to know different things about it. Feminists have developed this line of thought by arguing that if one starts off thought from the kinds of activities or "life worlds" assigned primarily to women in any particular historical situation (in any particular class, race, ethnicity, culture, etc.), one can gain different and valuable insights not only about those activities but also about the kinds of activities and thought that tend to be favored by those groups of men who are not expected to do such "women's work." For example, one would expect, and can find, distinctive kinds of moral reasoning and insights into how the dominant institutions work arising from child care, care of the elderly, the sick, and of people's bodies and emotions more generally that do not arise in the administrative/ managerial "head work" that constitutes ruling in our kind of society (Carol Gilligan 1982; Harding 1986, 1991; Nancy Hartsock 1983; Hilary Rose 1983; Dorothy Smith 1987,1990). The time and energy for some people to perform the abstract, mental labor of administrative/managerial work is created by assigning the work of caring for their bodies and emotions, and the bodies and emotions of everyone else, to others - primarily but not exclusively women. Thus "women's work" is a precondition for the existence of the "autonomous" thought and will of the ideal human figured in Western political and moral philosophy. Far from being autonomous, this thought and will turns out to be dependent on the thought and activity of women and other groups whose distinctive sociality Western political and moral philosophy devalues and marginalizes. Theories of the political, the social, the economic, the moral, the rational and the intellectual that fail to discuss the valuable distinctive forms of these human characteristics arising from "women's work" are the functional equivalent of sociobiology; in excluding women's activities from the proper domain of their study, they implicitly assign these activities to the natural and misunderstand the conditions for and nature of administrative/managerial work. "Women's work" disappears into the natural for men who still associate it with the "motherworld" they struggled to leave behind as they grew up. The economists cited earlier have started off thinking about economic relations from the perspective of women's activities rather than of the conceptual schemes in the dominant institutions, including the discipline of economics, from which women have systematically been excluded. Starting off our thought from the lives of those who are assigned body and emotional labor is an empirical and theoretical project. It does not automatically flow or erupt into the consciousness of those who perform it. Women have had to learn to characterize their activities in terms of a double-day of work, to recognize sexual harassment not as "boys will be boys," but as a violation of our civil rights; to see rape not as a consequence of our "asking for it" or of the inevitability of some deranged men acting out; to see their lower wages not as a reflection of their lower natural talents and abilities or their natural obligations to domestic work, but as a matter of economic exploitation. Feminist insights are empirical and theoretical achievements, requiring political and scientific struggles against the dominant institutions and their discourses. The point is that "legitimated" knowledge communities tend to come from, or aspire to, the same social strata as do managers and administrators - the "rulers" of modern societies. No wonder the conceptual schemes of economics, sociology, political science, philosophy and other disciplines "echo" those of the dominant public policies. The social sciences "work up" everyday life into forms suitable for administrators to process; philosophy justifies these forms as rational, objective and ethically ideal. (23-4)

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Fem K Organizing › 2NC › 2NC Epistemology

Zalewski, PhD , 1995

(Marysia, Well, What is the feminist Perspective on Bosnia?, International Affairs Vol 71 No 2, April)

The question in the title is one that feminist scholars working within international relations have been asked many times. The specific issue changes- it might be the Gulf War, or Somalia, or the Cuban missile crisis-but the enquiry is essentially the same. Probably the main reasons for the frequency of such questioning are the explosion of feminist work in the subject, and the fact that feminist theory has only recently infiltrated the academic discipline of international relations. Courses on gender/women/feminism and/in inter- national relations are proliferating in the United Kingdom, North America, Europe and Australia; PhDs on relevant topics are in progress; and many books, chapters and articles are being published. One might venture three possible reasons for these changes which have occurred in the last decade or so: more women students and teachers within the discipline; the desire to find more fruitful tools of analysis given the 'failure' of academic international relations largely to imagine, let alone predict, major changes in the international sphere such as the demise of the Soviet bloc, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the signing of the Arab-Israeli peace accord; and the breaking down of rigid disciplinary boundaries which has meant that international relations has been belatedly influenced by developments in subjects such as philosophy, politics and sociology. These changes, events and intrusions, it is argued, have led to a critical assault on the discipline, usually referred to as the 'third debate', whereby international relations as a discipline is accused of being reactionary, theoreticaliy naive, male-biased, gender-insensitive and generally ill-equipped even to start thinking about the problems of contemporary world politics in any more than a superficial way. These criticisms have come mainly from three broad groups: feminist theorists, critical theorists and post-modernists. My concern in this article is with one of these, namely feminist scholarship in international relations. I will start by looking briefly at a key feminist concept-gender. (339-40)

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